as someone else who grew up in a little liberal pocket in the south this articulates a bit of how i felt about it as a little kid my brother and i had zero positive or negative feelings towards it when we were really young it was just a thing people wore and sometimes had on their trucks it seemed like an innocent thing at the time then another girl called me a nigger at a soccer game in rd grade and that view of it all started to fade away up until a few years ago i still had close friends that wore the confederate flag all the time i tried explaining the symbol of hate thing to them and they were just flat out incapable of really seeing it as anything other than a southern pride thing eventually i just stopped bringing it up